


Tomorrow Their Houses Become Sepulchers

by lilith_morgana



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Biblical Themes (Abrahamic Religions), Character Study, F/F, F/M, Lucifer (TV) Season/Series 04, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 18:14:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20313850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilith_morgana/pseuds/lilith_morgana
Summary: The endless scope of her life rumbles inside her.





	Tomorrow Their Houses Become Sepulchers

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Lucifer Bingo prompt **"road trip"**, interpreted in the most liberal sense, of course. 
> 
> Thanks to the awesome [Fleem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fleem/pseuds/Fleem) for beta-reading, any remaining mistakes are my own fault.

  
  
  
Somewhere in Eden, buried deep within the lush vegetation and dry paths that recognise the sound of their feet, there is a garden that remembers her.   
  
She sits engulfed by it, running leaves between her fingers, rolling pebbles in her palm, feeling them cool and dry against her warm skin. Her skin that used to be so warm back then, sunkissed and sustained, basking under the benevolent skies. Even at night, the air is mild and gentle like a loving caress.   
  
Is she happy there? Is she content before the fall? 

For the rest of her endless existence, she cannot answer this, can't reach back to a time when she doesn't _ know_. It’s the lost innocence of the childhood she never had. 

She never mourns it.   


  
\---   
  
  
  
The angel in her garden breathes free will into her ear, tickles the heavy streak of defiance that is already there, that boils in her blood. It's a secret her body has been holding. It’s a disobedient rhythm between her ribs, at the bottom of her lungs. It’s a beat in between her parted legs where his mouth is miraculous in all its rebellion. Eve gives in, starved for choice, greedy for the quiet uproar in following her desire.   
  
“Tell me what you want,” he says, as though it’s important and it is, it _ is_. 

Isn't it?  
  
His beauty is cold and perfect, its light bright and revealing, but his smile is warm; he has a face cut from the divine matter that shapes all God’s angels, and a core that burns more intensely than anyone else’s.   
  
She can taste the universe on his lips, the dust of stars on his hands, and the unbearable longing of the unforgiven that is written on every divine stretch of his skin. 

Is there regret in her? In him? In Adam who falls to his knees in prayer, shifting the blame to her?   
  
The warm rain that falls at night washes away their traces from Heaven and all the unanswered questions with them.   
  
  
\---   
  
  
  
  
In suffering and labor she brings forth children. So they say. So it is.   
  
She holds newborns in her arms, nurses them at her breast, knows their heartbeats as well as her own; she loses them all to weakness, to sin, to their own follies. For the first starved years of their mortal lives, she buries seven children, all of them tiny and warped little girls, unfinished creations. The Bible, much later, considers them inconsequential, but they were _ there. _ She names them in her head to remember.   
  
She knows it’s punishment.   
  
And then she bears Cain, who is made under her ribs like the others, who is brought to life from her body, borrowing her breath, her light, her pain to come into the world. It’s harsh and brutal, but he enters it and she bleeds, oh she _ bleeds _ for him. He’s a big baby who screams through the nights and nurses until she feels faint. The spring he is born Eve's hunger never stops. She eats and drinks and weeps, and places the insatiable creature beside her, curls up around his little body on the ground, thinking _ you shall be the death of me_.

He is the first to survive, but it's the second, Abel, soft and slouching, who teaches her what love means: that it doesn't _matter_.  
  
Earth destroys them, corrodes and corrupts. Cain becomes jealous, greedy, the wretched glint in his eyes that has always been there is so large now, so dark. She watches him, listens to him; he turns his back on her like she had turned away from the word of God.   
  
Abel, always the sweetest, the one who places his palms around her face and kisses her nose, turns prideful and lazy, unlearns his humility and kindness as he grows. He measures his devotion, counts his good deeds, lets the bad ones pass unnoticed.   
  
Adam carries their son's body home; she will never forget the look on his face, the cold outlines of his eyes as he places Abel at her feet. Abel, her sweet Abel. She counts the places where the rock has hit him, maps them out in her heart. Her fingertips travel over the borders between life and death, between obedience and sin. Here beside him, her mind moves heavy and slow across the layers of time. Remembers the boy who sat on her back while she harvested turnips, garbling songs and muttering her name in a mismatched prayer. Remembers the way he’d giggle as they bent down, almost knocking them both over. Remembers the young man he became. 

He is beaten, battered, he is _ broken, _and her tears leave streaks on his skin as she washes and swathes him like she did with all of his sisters. 

She knows it's punishment.  
  
  
  
\---   
  
  
  
When another son is born, Eve doesn’t let him out of her sight until he’s as tall as her and already broad of shoulder. He is a son in Adam’s likeness and image but he has her heart and she knows its rhythm, knows the reassuring courage and endurance within.   
  
They call him Seth.   
  
Eve kisses his dark curls and thinks _ you are our hope_.   
  
If she ever has faith after Eden, it is in him.   
  
  
  
\---   


Heaven is everything their mortal lives are not. 

She doesn't deserve it, has no use for it, can't encompass the soft, unthinking peace after a lifetime of war. It’s Adam who earns Heaven, ever the obedient servant once his eyes have been opened to the sins of his hands; it’s Adam who works diligently, untiringly; it’s Adam who talks to God, who prays and repents and reforms. She follows him; this is one promise she holds on to. Perhaps God forgives her too while he’s at it or perhaps he merely forgot.   
  
_ Our sons and daughters_, Adam says sometimes, meaning the human race that spreads out like a disease.   
  
Eve thinks of Abel, of the girls she kissed and wrapped in cloth and sent away to a God she had enraged. _ We _ she says sometimes but Adam is so far away and nobody listens.   
  
They can never talk about it.   
  
When rumor spreads that Lucifer has escaped Hell and Amenadiel returns to Heaven, full of change and visions, the celestial world as she knows it rocks on its own foundations, though not ungently, not entirely. Not to someone like her. 

Eve sees a path unfold, clenches her hands into fists, and _ runs_. 

  


\---

  


Earth is nothing like she has imagined from watching ESPN, only distantly resembling the accounts she's coaxed from newly arrived souls. 

It's better. It's worse.   
  
The streets are crowded and bright; the humans are shameless and wild. Eve navigates between them like she once would navigate with the help of Lucifer’s stars.   
  
Those stars lead her to him, and she wants them to have meaning, wants to confess that she thinks they _ do, _ but he has never believed in destiny, so she keeps the words at the back of her tongue.   
  
Hell and Earth have altered him, but the light from his soul is the same. It falls in the same way over his features. It must render him untouchable, she thinks. Down here, where everything is shades of grey, he is divine darkness and divine light, so very rarely something in between.   
  
She kisses his darkness, melts into his light, thinks _ here I am, here I am. _   
  
And Lucifer’s hands are decisive and gentle on her body, but in her arms he fades into a shade of grey that _ disgusts _him. Eve doesn’t even comprehend until she sees what Chloe and the other humans bring out of him, the blinding Heavenly light that soars through his voice, the depths of godlike darkness he reveals. 

  


\---

  
  
“I wanted to kill him myself,” she tells him once, her mouth resting against his temple, his fingers counting the birthmarks on her arms. _ Thirty-five_. “I wanted it settled, but Adam wouldn’t let me. He said Cain was God’s child to punish as he saw fit.”   
  
His warm body freezes mid-motion. There’s a catch in his voice when he speaks again.   
  
“Eve, I-”   
  
She remembered Adam’s arms around her body, his determination, and how she had struggled, raging against the resolve of his faith. His voice in her ear - _ it doesn’t bring him back, Eve, it doesn’t make it right _ \- and his broad, strong hands around her face. She had dug her nails into his knuckles, her teeth into his flesh and he had held her. The following day he returned to her after having seen Cain being sent away, and she had returned the favor by running her hands down his back while he sobbed into the rapidly falling night. _ We failed Him, Eve, we failed them. _ She isn’t half as devout, not nearly as servile. She listens, she tends to him and she bites back her protests, thinks _ this, too, is punishment _ .   
  
“I don’t blame you.”   
  
Lucifer looks at her like he hadn’t even _ considered _ that, and she realises that he probably hasn’t.   
  
The endless scope of her life rumbles inside her.   
  
  
  
\---

  
“Tell me about them.” In one of the side-rooms at Lux, they smoke cigars while drinking strong whiskey that tastes of tar and wood. "I'm so tired of being ignored. Tell me."  
  
Maze looks up from her drink and hands over the Arturo Fuente. “No.”   
  
“_Tell _ me about them.” Eve places the cigar between her lips and puffs, keeps the smoke in her mouth, and watches through heavy-lidded eyes. “Lucifer didn’t.”   
  
He had once, and Eve had felt his despair in the pit of her stomach, a clenched fist of ache and guilt; she had never approached the matters after that, never spoke of anything from her first human life again. 

“Of course he didn’t,” Maze mutters in response.   
  
“I know they weren’t good men, but they were my sons. I want to know what happened.”   
  
"_Fine_."  
  
They look at each other over the table, gazes locking into each other, tugging at the layers of pretense and composure. Eve smiles, wide and pleading in the way that renders the King of Hell pliant and almost guiltily agreeable. She leans back in her seat, placing one leg over the other.   
  
And Maze talks, grits her teeth and refills their drinks and _ talks _. 

  
  
\---   
  
  
  
Earth is imbalance and greed, she learns quickly.   
  
Maze wants her in the way Eve wants Lucifer; it’s a grotesque mirror, a broken image.   
  
Eve sinks, drowns, and when she comes up for breath, spits her insights like curses.   
  
“I’ve been so stupid.”   
  
“Oh yeah,” Maze agrees. Her fury flashes red-hot and lethal, her knuckles whitening around the blades she carries everywhere. “What the fuck did you even _ think _ would happen? Dealing with demons? Have you got any idea how Hell works, how a rebellion down there would - ” she swallows, paces, looks at Eve again with a gaze that shatters everything.   
  
“I don’t know, I just… I just love him.” It’s a breathless gasp, faint and useless.   
  
Maze relents, unexpectedly, the harshness of her voice dropping to a low register of what almost sounds like regret.   
  
“I may be a demon, Eve, but even I know that what you did? Yeah, that’s not _ love_.”   
  
  
  
\---   
  
  
  
In the shadow of Lilith, Adam has no choice but to turn his gaze to her, and Eve has no choice but to comply. They fall together; they crawl back to their feet together; they do not have the luxury of loving each other.   
  
Humans in her second mortal existence speak of love so easily or so reluctantly, so wastefully and with great yearning at the same time. They call everything love and mean nothing by it; they refuse to recognise their own feelings and die alone.   
  
  
  
\---   
  
  
  
“I don’t _ feel _ like a human,” she tells Maze; it’s a confession that burns in her throat.   
  
“I know.”  
  
“Heaven is so… _ cold _ , it…” she trails off, her eyes following the shape of Maze’s arm, all the way up to her neck. It’s so cold it burns, so cold that every layer of humanity still present in your soul when you arrive there freezes from within, cracks, and falls off. It doesn’t move, doesn’t change, it merely stagnates inside you like a weight.   
  
“I don’t even remember what it was like. I thought I might - that I _ would _ .”   
  
She thinks of the way she’s been chasing a connection ever since she came back to Earth, her mind solely focused on sensation, her limbs moving on their own, her heart hardened against everything except Lucifer, the one thing in the universe that had still made her _ feel. _ He’d run his fingers down her back and she’d remember hunger in her ancient, long-forgotten makeshift home; he’d kiss the inside of her thighs and she’d remember the taut lines of her body when her children were born; he’d hold his hands on her hips, cradling her against him and she’d think of Cain, of Nod, of Adam’s silence.   
  
“You know I’m-” Maze looks uncertain for a second, before shuffling the expression away with a smile. “I’m here for that. Making you feel human. Any time.”   
  
“I’m not sure I can.” There are days when she thinks that what she lost in Eden wasn’t, in fact, the childlike wonder of the unknowing but her fragile shell of humanity. That whatever she is now is just a cruel echo.   
  
She feels a hand on her arm, fingers cradling her wrist.   
  
“Then I’m here for that, too.”   
  
  
  
\---   
  
  
  
When everything has - oh, has it _ ever _ \- gone to Hell, Eve borrows one of Lucifer’s unused cars, suddenly grateful that he had insisted on giving her driving lessons. _ Nobody walks in America, Eve, and you saw what happened with that uber driver. _ Maze has filled it to the brim with clothes and coconut water, with junk food and snacks and wine. She hands her a wallet full of cash and cards, just like Lucifer had done back when she first plopped down in his life, and Eve thinks about how similar they are, how _ alike _ in their care. It’s the strangest thing on Earth, being cared for.   
  
“I’ll be back,” she promises.   
  
“Yeah,” Maze replies, with the shallow, brittle cockiness Eve finds endearing, the sort of cover that only _ barely _ masks the vulnerability beneath, but comes with iron and claws all the same. _ Wait for me _ , Eve thinks, hoping that somebody will for once. “Yeah, you’re gonna be back for this.”   
  
Her smile lasts long after Maze has disappeared in the distance.   
  
  
  
\---   
  


Five months and a whole lifetime later, she enters _ Lux _ again.   
  
“Finally,” Maze says. She sounds impatient and anxious and hopeful, all shades of desire. The combination makes her voice oddly tight, nearly bursting.   
  
“Finally,” Eve agrees. “I wanted to be sure I know what I’m doing this time.”   
  
The other woman observes her, arms folded across her chest so Eve can see every inch of the cleavage; her breath hitches in her throat, _ delighted _ .   
  
“Do you?” The question is blunt and _ raw _ and leaves a mark in the air.   
  
Eve nods. “I do.”   
  
And Maze is like a fire, a deadly blade that carries a scent of steel and blood; she’s domination and violence and that dark pull at the bottom of Eve’s stomach whenever she allows herself to think about how she would move inside her, fingers and tongue and toys. But she’s soft under Eve’s hands, pliant and wide-eyed and full of wonder as they kiss, slow and certain, like they have all the time in the world.   
  
Eve’s fingers get stuck in Maze’s thick hair - it’s purple now, dark and curly and purple and she _ loves _ it - and Maze’s fingers hook into the buttons of Eve’s dress as she’s pulling them closer. There's a shiver down her spine all the way from her neck when Maze groans slightly, a sharp intake of breath when the kiss deepens and intensifies, and Eve feels like she’s stumbling into the unknown.   
  
In the massive windows of the home they borrow - _ get a bloody room, will you _ \- their reflection trembles, but Maze is a solid presence against Eve’s body, a last outpost before the unmapped territory.   
  
“You are _ amazing _ ,” she mutters into Eve’s neck, her naked shoulder, her wide-open arms.   
  
“You’re one to talk.”

  
“It’s been months, Eve.” Maze growls. “ _ Months _ .”   
  
Eve raises an eyebrow, pushing up on her elbows. “What, you actually waited?”   
  
“What the hell do you think, human?” Maze’s voice is rough but her smile is soft, the corners of her mouth trembling under Eve’s lips. “I was loyal to Lucifer for an eternity. You really think I couldn’t keep it in my pants a little while for _ you _?” 

Eve laughs and Maze reaches for her, slipping one arm around Eve's waist, the other still travelling over her body that feels impossibly old and brand new in the bright city lights.   
  
Somewhere in LA, high above ground, in a penthouse that smells of citrus and tobacco, there is a sliver of Eden, and Eve spreads her fingers around it, like branches of an ancient tree. 


End file.
